9-11's Limited Hangouts

Jamey Hecht, Ph.D. dismembers the psychological games being played as independent 9/11 researchers all over the world back the US Government into
ever-shrinking corners. One more time we see that the enemy we must fight is as much within ourselves as it is within those who would ask us to accept
the concept of "Failure".

November 22, 2003 1500 PDT (FTW) -- Gerald Posner's new book is called Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11. This is the Posner who won
fame in 1993 when he became the foremost advocate of the official story of the Kennedy Assassination. Case Closed claimed to prove that the 35th
President of the United States was murdered (for no particular reason) by a lone nut. The very methodology of that book - quite apart from its
conclusions - has been discredited by the fact-checking research of scholar after scholar.[1] His footnotes often lead nowhere, or direct the reader
to sources whose pages say the opposite of what Posner attributes to them. But the book sold well. Like Senator Arlen Specter's recent memoir A
Passion For Truth, it reassured people who were in the market for reassurance. With that success on his resume, Posner continues to practice his
chosen vocation of making himself useful to those who drive the gravy train.

So before we take up this question of "why America slept," let's dwell for a moment on "failure," the mighty, little word that has done so much
dutiful service in American newspapers. Just as it was ten years ago, it's the key word of Posner's explanatory paradigm.[2] Oswald did the
shooting; Oswald got lucky; Dallas was a failure of security. When Secret Service agents drank themselves into a stupor until 3 a.m. the night before
the Dallas motorcade; when they let open windows go unwatched all over the Plaza; when they permitted the relatively safe motorcade route to be
changed to an absolutely dangerous one; when Emory Roberts ordered agent Rybka off his post on the President's limousine at Love Field; when agent
Kellerman turned around in the front seat and passively watched the President, already wounded in the throat and the back, sit upright until his head
exploded; and when agent Greer slowed the limousine down to a stop until the fatal shot was over - in short, when the most highly-trained professional
executive protection unit in the world suffered a total collapse of the standard operating procedures which they had followed to the letter on every
previous stop along the Texas trip - all of that was a failure. It's a damn shame, you see. A sorry episode of darned incompetence; spilt milk.[3]

Posner's title Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 is intended to echo a youthful work of John Kennedy who, with a great deal of help,
wrote a short study of the British appeasement of Hitler in the Chamberlain period. That comparison would be offensive if it were original with
Posner, but Gary Hart made it (in quite a different spirit) on December 13, 2001 in his keynote speech at the National Academies.[4] Hart attributed
the national security aspect of 9/11 to America's loss of focus in the wake of the Cold War's end:

Having gone through this experience predicting that some kind of terrorist attacks would occur,[5] seeing them occur alive on television, and then
being asked most often by the media that paid almost no attention to this what it felt like, I don't think my own personal feelings were any
different from any of yours in terms of the gravity of the tragedy, perhaps needless, perhaps not. But it has caused me at least to spend a lot of
time in the last three months reflecting on a theme that John Kennedy wrote about when he was a senior at Harvard. His senior thesis was Why England
Slept. And I have thought a lot about why American slept, what were the factors that lulled us into not being prepared [my emphasis].

I think there were several factors. First obviously was the end of the cold war and the decade between, almost exactly a decade, between the collapse
of the Soviet empire and these attacks. There was a loss of a central organizing principle, starting with George Kennan, 1946-1947, and the phrase
containment of communism. That became the central organizing principle of our nation for over a half Century.

I remember... a well-known Soviet interlocutor named George A. Arbatov, who ran the U.S. Canada Institute in Russia, and he was interviewed by a
Western journalist in the early Gorbachev years, I think 1987-1988, something like that. And the journalist said, 'Mr. Arbatov, what is this
Gorbachev revolution all about?' And Arbatov said, 'we are about to do to you, the United States, the worst thing that could happen.' The
journalist's head snapped back thinking nuclear attack. Arbatov said 'we are going to take away your enemy.' That is exactly what happened.

The Senator's phrase "perhaps needless [i.e., preventable], perhaps not" is intriguing. But the salient thing here is the Perestroika anecdote. If
the loss of an enemy is the worst thing that could happen, well, we had better get some more enemies. It's true that the end of the Cold War meant
the loss of a "central organizing principle." Maybe 9/11 went unprevented because, in the absence of a Soviet threat to keep us vigilant, "America
slept." Perhaps it's also true that 9/11 was permitted to happen because, as per Mr. Arbatov's cynical wisdom, "America" needed a new enemy. [6]
September 11th certainly put one on the world stage.

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